Research in my laboratory focuses
on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying cognitive control,
and their disturbance in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia
and depression. Cognitive control is the ability to guide attention,
thought and action in accord with goals or intentions. One of
the fundamental mysteries of neuroscience is how this capacity
for coordinated, purposeful behavior arises from the distributed
activity of many billions of neurons in the brain. Several decades
of cognitive and neuroscientific research have focused on the
mechanisms by which control influences processing (e.g., attentional
effects in sensory processing, goal directed sequencing of motor
output, etc.), and the brain structures upon which these functions
depend, such as the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex,
basal ganglia and brainstem neuromodulatory systems. However,
we still have a poor understanding of how these systems give
rise to cognitive control. Our work seeks to develop formally
explicit hypotheses about the functioning of these systems,
and to test these hypotheses in empirical studies. An important
motivation for this work is the development of a theoretically
sound foundation for research on the relationship between disturbances
of brain function and their manifestation as disorders of thought
and behavior in psychiatric illness.